French Ghosts, Russian Nights, and American Outlaws: Souvenirs of a Professional Vagabond. Susan Spano

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INTRODUCTION

      As a travel writer for two of America’s greatest newspapers—the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times—I could go almost anyplace I liked. All I had to do was write about it when I got back home.

      I took unforgettable trips to Paris to chase literary ghosts; St. Petersburg, Russia, in the white depths of winter; the American West on the trail of Butch and Sundance; the seedy French Polynesian island of Huahine, where I was chased by a pack of wild dogs; and Venice in out-of-season splendor, with rainstorms flooding the Piazza San Marco. I took wild rides through Old Delhi in an auto-rickshaw, over the Yangtze River on a condemned cable car, and across the Andes in a shared taxi that reeked of gasoline. I hiked into lost canyons along Utah’s Escalante River, through the jungles of Costa Rica, and across Morocco’s Anti-Atlas Mountains, where some sneak thief stole my boots. The people I encountered are etched in my memory too, like the man in a laundromat in County Clare, Ireland, where I was biking in foul weather. “Ireland’s a grand country,” he told me. “Rain is the only fault in it.”

      I am not religious, but there were also moments of what I can only call spiritual rapture—when some part of me, some sap beneath the wood, responded to seeing the moon glow over a frozen lake above the Arctic Circle in Sweden or hearing the susurrus of chanting lamas at Potala Palace in Tibet.

      I had bad trips, too: feeling sick to my stomach in Istanbul, trekking through the Libyan Sahara in a sandstorm, cold-camping in Alaska with a drunken guide. But though they’re wretched at the time, bad trips make good stories. What better souvenir?

      Only once, as I recall, did I find myself wanting to go home, and that was when I was 14, on a long bike ride through neighborhoods west of St. Louis, where I grew up. A quiet misfit in youth, I’d taken to riding away from our suburban tract home with no destination in mind, only a whim to see new things and figure out the lay of the land. In the heat of a midwestern summer I ended up at a gas station surrounded by cornfields, realizing that I’d gone too far to make it back home. So I asked the attendant to let me use his phone and called my mom. She didn’t mind coming for me in our red Chevy station wagon. She was a geography teacher who took me on my first trip abroad a few years later—to Japan, where I found out it doesn’t feel bad to be a foreigner, a stranger, a traveler.

      I grew up knowing that if anything went wrong, no matter where I was, my mother and father would come for me. They are gone now, but I still wear that invisible shield.

      With such a feeling, I could travel far and learn that the world is full of places nothing like St. Louis, each its own strange and marvelous confluence of history, culture, landscape, faith, and food.

      When I say I have a love of place, I don’t mean I love getting there. Twenty-hour plane rides are no fun. I don’t love long lines, a suitcase full of dirty clothes, inglorious restrooms around the world. Nor do I mean that I have a need to plant my little flag on every continent, to be the first person to reach some mountaintop or remote village, to visit the hundred places some book tells us we must see before we die—I call that acquisitive travel. What I mean is that I love places, the feelings they evoke, the points of view they ask us to comprehend, the meanings they reveal.

      Much has already been written about almost everywhere. Too much, perhaps. Of course, I read whatever I can get my hands on before embarking on a trip to avoid wasting time and making stupid mistakes. But I sometimes think it takes the adventure out of travel, ensuring that I will find only what I expect to find. So I add this book to the wide library of travel books with some trepidation, hoping just to describe some of the places I love and what happened to a girl on a bike who discovered that the world is full of stories waiting to be lived.